New Zealand’s Telecom Wholesale and WorldxChange Communications are piloting phone and broadband services over fibre-optic cables connected directly to homes in a new housing development in Orewa, north of Auckland. Another 13 developments and 3,500 households throughout the country will be added over the next 24 months.
Telecom Wholesale is trialling two variants of broadband over fibre which will provide either a voice-only service or broadband (including voice), which will support download speeds up to 30Mbps and an upload speed of 6Mbps. A 30Mbps symmetrical service is planned for later in the trial. Information from the pilot trials will be used to inform the design and deployment of a fully equivalent, fibre-based broadband service that will be available to all service providers in first the half of 2009. These services are expected to include variants with symmetrical connections of up to 100Mbps.